Common Ground: Eighteenth-Century English Satiric Fiction and the PoorStanford University Press, 01.06.2002 - 230 Seiten Work on both the satire and the fiction of the English eighteenth century has tended to focus on the transition from a patrician culture to a culture dominated by the logic of the market. This book shifts the focus from the struggle between aristocratic and bourgeois values to another set of important, yet usually unremarked, class relations: those between the gentle classes and the poor. The author reads four eighteenth-century satiric novels Henry Fielding's Joseph Andrews, Laurence Sterne's A Sentimental Journey, Tobias Smollett's Humphrey Clinker, and Frances Burney's Cecilia "from below," exploring the ways in which the gentle authors' experiences of the poor shape the novels both thematically and formally. The author argues that in these novels the mental structures of gentlemen and gentlewomen characters are formed through acts of imitation of and identification with the poor. The four novels all concern, in varying degrees of explicitness, the ways the poor were despised and denied politically and socially: the curtailing of popular festivity, the shift from a paternalist to a contractual model of service, the social dislocations caused by enclosure, and the commodification of labor. In the novels' representations of gentle consciousness, the author suggests, the gentry mimic and identify with the socially marginal, their imaginary repertoires formed out of such identification. Claiming that affect is formed in the interrelation of social groups as they react to economic change, this book centers on the conjunction of economic change, novelistic technique, and the constitution of affects. Further, it suggests that satire which, during this period, was falling into disrepute under the pressure of contemporary attempts to redefine comedy may be regarded as a generic form that arrests affect, refusing to idealize or cover over the devastating social effects of economic "progress," but at the same time unable to see and say what has been lost. The satiric element in these novels is the moment where anxiety about the gentry's relation to the poor and hence the gentry's very self-definition is most richly performed and ritualized. |
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Common Ground: Eighteenth-century English Satiric Fiction and the Poor Judith Frank Keine Leseprobe verfügbar - 1997 |
Häufige Begriffe und Wortgruppen
Abdera Adams affect agricultural ambivalence anxiety argues attempt Belfield benevolence body Bramble Bramble's burlesque Burney Burney's novel Cecilia century chapter character charity claim Claudia L comic conscience creates culture daughter Delvile describe disavowal discipline domestic woman Doody E. P. Thompson eighteenth eighteenth-century Ellis/Juliet emotion enclosure English Enquiry Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick Fanny fantasy feeling female Fielding Fielding's figure France Frances Burney function gentle gentleman grief Humphry Clinker Ibid ideological imagination imitation Jery Joseph Andrews kind labor leisure literacy literature loss lower classes McKeon melancholia ment moral mother mourning nature Pamela period pleasure political poor poverty regarded relation representation represented ridiculous Robbins satire says scene Sentimental Journey sentimental novel sermon servants sexual shame Shamela Shandy Sir Jaspar Sir Roger Slipslop Smollett's social sorrow Stallybrass and White starling status Sterne Sterne's suggests tion Tristram Shandy University Press voice Walter Shandy women writes Yorick